On the way to Kansas

I am a big fan of airports that have play zones for children. Ellison is having a great time, and he is incredibly excited to see grandma and grandpa and uncle Sethy and all the rest!

EXPANDING THE DIALOGUES

I.

I've gone off of Facebook, at least for a minute. I've often used Facebook as a way to make public my anxieties and frustrations about any number of things. Most often, I've written about inequality, however voiced, in one of its many, many forms.

I don't know why I've done this. It doesn't matter, it doesn't change anyone's mind, ever. I know that the only people who "like" what I've written are people who already agree with me and my positions. I suppose I've been arrogant enough to think I might sometimes somehow say something of use to someone who didn't have it before.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

All of which is to say, even though my writing anything at all is futile at best and self-indulgent at worst, I've always tried to voice my opinions with kindness and fairness and to never (or at least rarely) make things too personal, and I've tried to use a tone that's considered and, I hope, thoughtful if not thought-provoking. And I suppose I've done what I've done because of a sad thought floating around in the back of my mind: If I die today, or tomorrow, or next month, I want my son to be able to look at that representation of me, however flawed it is as representation, and be able to get a sense of who I was as a human being. What mattered to me. Who mattered to me. My hope is that, by looking at what I posted, what I wrote, how I wrote it, he might feel closer to me as he grew up, even if I weren't there. To paraphrase and appropriate a line from Toni Morrison, the boy might grow into a man who could consider me a friend of his mind.

Now, I'm not foolish enough to actually believe that that's true, that Facebook will even exist in another year or two or fifteen, or that the boy wouldn't have far better things to do than go back and read Facebook posts I wrote about what a monster Trump is. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, the history books will do a much better job of that than I ever can or could. But still, as Zora Neale Hurston explained in such a lovely way, self-revelation is the oldest human longings.

II.

I just read the article "How Racism May Cause Black Mothers to Suffer the Death of Their Infants" (NPR yesterday) and it made my heart ache. How is it possible that we live in a world that is still -- still -- animated by such hatred, such racism, such pain, such conscious rejection of human equality and dignity that some mothers are much, much more likely to suffer this sort of unspeakable horror?

I don't know if those two sections above are related. Truly, I don't. But for some reason, they were bumping up against each other in my mind this morning.

III.

Here's an old picture of the boy, sent to me by Sister Eva. Not sure how old he is here, but probably somewhere around (over ) a year? She'd had us over for dinner, and the boy loved her favorite reading chair, which tickled Eva no end so she snapped this pic:

That seems a better direction to point at the bottom of this post. Forward, and to the future.

Merry Christmas from Auntie Simone

Ellison opened a gift from Auntie Simone last night -- and he LOVED it! He was so happy and grateful to her for the (incredibly realistic!) set of tools, and he woke up wanting to play with them this morning. 

Poor Auntie was sick when we talked with her on FaceTime last night, so that's why he asks about her here. He is a sweet boy, and he was still worried about her....

A few more snow pics…

We haven’t had a lot of snow this season, which is a shame, because the boy enjoys the snow so very much. We’ve been out in it as often as possible, and we are looking forward to more….

AN EPIPHANY OF SORTS

Just the other day, my own Papa (aka, PapaBear; aka PapaKerm; aka PapaHawk; aka PapaFrogHawk; aka PapaJayHawk, etc.) suggested this post (below), which was on Facebook, should make its way to the Papa Dialogues. I don't know what this space is or what it will be -- but I do know it'll change. But I hope it's a nice place for me to come back to from time to time in order to look at pics of the boy.
                                *     *     *

You know, I was just thinking about James Joyce, and I had an epiphany of sorts. An appropriate time for one, I suppose. But anyway, as I was putting the boy down for bed tonight, my mind was reeling as I tried to keep up with his and with him, to follow the collapsing and conjoining words of what he was saying, to keep track of the subtle references and allusions to elements from his day, to songs and movies and Daniel Tiger, to books and magazines and fairytales, some of which I know, many of which I do not. He started telling me about conversations he’d had, in medias res, as if I’d been there, as if I should know them. I struggled mightily when he asked me to sing a particular song, and after he ably sang a couple fragments from it, it still took me several minutes to realize that I did in fact know it, somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, in a place I had long forgotten about, and I felt pride when I made that connection, and I smiled and laughed with him, proud of him for remembering something from so long ago. And then, because he’s two, there was also the constant integrating of potty humor, of jokes without punchlines, of penis-talk and scrotum-grabbing and poo and pee and all that stuff. And he kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer. And as I sang to him his third “last song” of the evening, I realized that this entire interaction — beautiful and tumbling and humbling — was very much like my experience reading Joyce’s Ulysses about nineteen years ago now.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that the boy is a genius. Not at all. But I am saying Joyce was, at least in part, because he knew all of this already. We too often talk about how difficult reading Joyce can be. But really, it’s exhilarating and funny and heartbreaking and fun and bawdy and dirty and all the rest. Yeah, yes, it can be hard, but by intentionally obfuscating so much of what he did in the obscure, the personal, the private, the mythic, the collective, and all the rest, he intuitively and intentionally understood that in so doing he would be edging his way back toward what he would have called the universal. Funny to have an experience like aesthetic arrest tonight these two decades after first reading Ulysses not from reading Joyce’s text, but from trying to read the text of the boy himself.

TASTY SNOW, GLORIOUS SNOW

Been awhile since we posted here at ye olde papa dialogue blogspot. But since I'm trying to stay off of social media, which has been my primary Ellison Headley publishing vehicle, I may try to get back on here a bit more regularly....

Here's one from last week and one of our first good snows of the season. This kid....